BIO/STATEMENT

I'm a tender-hearted queer, a public crier, and a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and thinker. I believe in compassionate and artful living. I'm taking it all one step at a time and with a grain of salt. I'm working on being present and being love, with radical and revolutionary intent. I'm 70 percent water, 100 percent heart, and I wear it on my sleeve. Two of the most influential people in my life are cats.

My pronouns are they/them/they.

Towards art in an imaginary future

Liz Clayton Scofield, 2014

Queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an identity. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an identity that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain.

— Jose Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (2009)

I propose:

A queer art that is not object-based.

A queer art that resists commodification.

A queer art that doesn’t look like art.

A queer art that is radical and revolutionary.

A queer art that lives, fucks, breathes, eats, and dies.

A queer art that cries, loves, bleeds, and cums.

A queer art that defies categorization.

A queer art that is personal.

A queer art that is political.

A queer art that increases representation and visibility of the diverse range of identities that exist.

A queer art that reveals the limited scope of narratives that are shown in media today.

A queer art that does not look pretty. It can look pretty but this is irrelevant. It should look pretty if it needs to be pretty, but its value is not in its prettiness. Its value should also be irrelevant.

A queer art that reveals its own pain and struggle in its continuous fight simply to exist.

A queer art that uses its pain and struggle as a strategy to effect change.

A queer art that embraces humor, that doesn’t take itself seriously, that reveals the absurdity surrounding it.

A queer art that is serious.

A queer art that embraces contradiction.

A queer art that doesn’t assume authority, that not only questions the society in which it exists but also questions itself.

A queer art that forces the viewer to question themselves.

A queer art that does not assume that it is art.

A queer art that is not intellectual or artistic masturbation, that does not concern itself with conversations that only happen in bubbles, that is not self-indulgent, that does not only comment on art itself.

A queer art that does not fuck itself and no one else.

A queer art that does not ask itself, Is this art?

A queer art that dissolves boundaries between the artist and what the artist produces.

A queer art that does not produce.

A queer art that believes conversation is an essential creative act.

A queer art that is not easy but does not necessarily require much effort.

A queer art that breaks at its seams and deteriorates, dissolves, that doesn’t pass the test of time because its relevance is now.

A queer art that denies tradition, that rebels against canons, that separates itself from the history of art.

A queer art that is not about making but about doing.

A queer art that is not about production but about action.

A queer art that disrupts the heteronormative cultural stasis by any means necessary.

STATEMENT

As a queer trans artist, I explore failure of social norms and expectations as method and process of living and art making(doing). I embrace failure and its potential as a strategy for rejecting expectations and creating (queer) models of living, being, and loving.

More concretely, I created a series of toys called LiZes in my likeness. I collaborate with the LiZes in a series of experiments, including performance, video, collages, interactive installation, and interventions in public space. I use these toys and my relationship with them to explore failure and utopia. Together, we imagine a new queer world. Through our experiments, I develop a richer, more robust imaginary world with the LiZes, that in turn allows me to develop strategies for living in this present world, as me, myself a failure and a queer.

...

I don’t attempt to offer solutions, answers, or plans for progress, but I do document the continuing exploration of my own identity; an ever-shifting understanding of myself, my body, and my identity; and a genuine hope that if we just keep pushing, maybe some walls will fall down, some things will change, and we may just have a brighter future after all. If we maintain a vivid imagination, a refusal to accept what is handed to us, and an ability to see beyond our current situation, then anything is possible.